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After taking a glance inside 1 million people's music libraries over a two-year period – that's the number they came up with. Even if you religiously download from blogs, take up Amazon on their Daily Deal, and buy used music, getting a hold of that many songs legally is still an expensive undertaking. It takes time.

Holly crap I've only got just over 1500 songs, all from cd's and itunes. A guys comment on there says that he has 57,000 songs and 90% is paid for, what the hell?! Must be a dentist or a lawyer. Surely theres some crap on there he never listens to...

With the dollar song that's over $7,000.
Do we seriously think many under 30's have spent that kind of money?
Actually, with all the talk of 99c, I think they're hard to find.
Most of the stuff I would download from iTunes is in the $2 range, likewise the dance music I buy, usually well over $1.

Well, let's see.... if a person buys an average of 2 songs a day, every day that's 730 songs/year, so it would take just over 9.5 years. If they buy 4 per day that's 1460/year, so it would take about 4.8 years to fill the ipod. If they buy some albums or add stuff they ripped from an existing CD collection that could bring it down more.

So it's doable.

I wouldn't say it's likely in most cases, but it's doable for a hard core fan who can afford, say $5 or more a day. Which isn't really all that much. $5 is the cost of an average well drink in most bars in this city. Most kids spend more than that in one visit to McDonald's.

Which brings up a point I'm rather fond of making - legal music is CHEAP these days. When I was a kid we were overjoyed if we could get 1 new album a week.

The funny thing is, right up front, it's clear this is a very self selected sample.. did you miss that part? The sample is people who use "tidysongs"... which is a program useful if you have bad metadata in your music files.. which you would not need to buy for $40 if you actually paid for your music. If you paid for your music, your metadata is all good.

Do you see why it's absolutely foolish to draw any conclusions about the size of the "average" itunes library? This is NOT average, period.

Originally Posted by oudplayerAs far as legal vs illegal files on ipods...
I teach a large survey class every semester at a major public university. We've had about 1000 students go through this class, mostly freshmen, so I'm talking about a generation that was born after 1990. I conduct surveys about music consumption, and have found the following:

95+% of students listen to mp3s on mobile devices. Some have collections of dozens or hundreds of gigabytes of mp3s, mostly consisting of rock, hip hop, and country music, with regional indie music making up a significant 4th category

only approximately 10% of students have ever purchased music through any online service such as iTunes

only about 30% of students have actually ever physically touched any form of physical music media such as a CD or LP, and fewer still actually own any

These numbers are consistent from semester to semester - the only one that is declining is the percentage who have touched any form of physical music media.

So where is all of this music coming from? It's not from iTunes. It's not from CD rips. It's from rapidshare and torrents. 1000 college students born after 1990 is not enough to generalize on a national basis (but it does provide more statistics than most of the posters here), but I've seen plenty of other well-documented peer-reviewed studies that indicate similar percentages - thatat best 10% of music stored on iPods owned by 18-24 olds is legitimately purchased.

Yes, that is true, but that doesn't change the fact that the data in numbers linked in your first post is very misleading, while I certainly accept the data in the link in the quote as a good data point.

Now, the 64 million dollar question:
How much of that would they have paid for if they couldn't have downloaded it?

Probably not a lot of it.
I'm absolutely and utterly fine with that.
As a commercial musician I don't actually value someone's largely illegally procured music library.
I'd rather someone had 100 tunes bought and paid for, than 7,000 illegally downloaded.
The fact is, Apple have sold 220 million iPods (not counting iPhones and every other mp3 playing platform).
If a small amount of legally paid for music tracks had found their way on to those 220 million iPods, I doubt we'd even HAVE a piracy forum.

Probably not a lot of it.
I'm absolutely and utterly fine with that.
As a commercial musician I don't actually value someone's largely illegally procured music library.
I'd rather someone had 100 tunes bought and paid for, than 7,000 illegally downloaded.
The fact is, Apple have sold 220 million iPods (not counting iPhones and every other mp3 playing platform).
If a small amount of legally paid for music tracks had found their way on to those 220 million iPods, I doubt we'd even HAVE a piracy forum.

My point is that if 95% of downloaded music is pirated, but people have 80x the music they would have bought, it starts to get really close to a wash at some point. Not to say that we shouldn't be trying to make it harder to find illegal files and prosecute people that people that profit from the sites.

The funny thing is, right up front, it's clear this is a very self selected sample.. did you miss that part? The sample is people who use "tidysongs"... which is a program useful if you have bad metadata in your music files.. which you would not need to buy for $40 if you actually paid for your music. If you paid for your music, your metadata is all good.

Do you see why it's absolutely foolish to draw any conclusions about the size of the "average" itunes library? This is NOT average, period.

Quote:

Originally Posted by boon

me too. my 60gb ipod is full of 320kb mp3's and i'd say 90% are from my CD collection. my itunes library is actually much bigger than that.. it won't all fit on my ipod.

it's not like people buy an ipod/mp3 player and then start downloading music.

Quote:

Originally Posted by chrisso

You should take some time out to read the latest research from Terry's blog.
I doubt you will, like you didn't have time to watch and learn from Ari Emanuel.

I don't really see any inherent conflict here.

Lots of people have huge legal music collections - as I pointed out it's really not that expensive, especially if you rip your own CDs.

Lots more people have huge illegal music collections. I know a number of them and they're not all kids.

That's data on ONE MILLION LIBRARIES filled with pirated material. That's misleading?

Do you know what "self selected" means John? That's not a snarky comment, honest question. Do you understand, if there are 100 million iTunes libraries in the world (making up that number, apple has sold more than 250 million ipods), that 1 million is a tiny number, and unlike surveys that do sampling, this one is SELF SELECTED... not selected to be representative.

If your conclusion is there are a damn lot of people who have illegal music... well, duh, we already know this. We all agree.

But if you're trying to use this data to determine, by the size of these particular self selected libraries, how much illegal music is in the "AVERAGE" library, then you have an extremely poor understanding of statistics. That's why this thread is misleading.

Quote:

Now, you can make conjectures and excuses all you want, but don't expect people to believe them and don't expect that you won't be refuted.

Yet, you're perfectly OK when this guy makes a completely misleading thread out of unrepresentative data. I really don't understand you John.

My point is that if 95% of downloaded music is pirated, but people have 80x the music they would have bought, it starts to get really close to a wash at some point.

I don't understand what 'a wash' is.

My point and the point of every creative person I know is simple. We want people to legally purchase the product we put out that isn't free.
If sales drop big time, or we individually struggle to make ends meet in that business climate.... so be it. It's not something we haven't dealt with our whole careers.

Yet, you're perfectly OK when this guy makes a completely misleading thread out of unrepresentative data.

This thread is just another talking point IMO. It doesn't absolutely prove anything.
You see, for those of us dealing with this in our work, the linked to article makes us say "I can imagine", NOT "there it is, there's absolute proof if you ever needed it". It's just another single item of evidence to consider.
Talking about

Quote:

this guy makes a completely misleading thread out of unrepresentative data.

is quite astonishing, seeing as you been bald faced doing exactly that for the last couple of months. Talk about deflecting the blame.